Tweety Bird 3: The Final Flight (and Another Fucking Pheasant)

I don’t know what is it about quails, but they seem to be a curse on Cordon Bleu students.

Tuesday was one of two lessons this week.  An unremarkable dish of quails stuffed with their own meat and lamb sweetbreads.  Oh joy…

Every time I deal with quails I still get the giggles thinking about the quails from Intermediate and how they drove us mad trying to “bone” them from the back (LOL!).  This time we carved them up, stuffed them, and served the pieces separately.  I had just sharpened my boning knife and zero fucks were given.  Take that Tweety Bird.

 

Unfortunately, this was a boring dish.  I really don’t love sweetbreads when they are braised into squishy greyness, and combined with quail it was tedious and time-consuming for what ended up on the plate.  Chef 2 said my dish was fine – I’ll take his word for it.  Even with his plating in the demo, it tasted like a dish we would have made in Basic Cuisine, and looked like one we would have made in Intermediate.  Other than as a review of quail and sweetbreads, why?

 

Yesterday was a little more interesting: the return of the bird that I call the Fucking Pheasant.  Fortunately, we were making a sauce bigarade (like with the Bloody Ducky in Intermediate), a gastrique with caramel, orange, cognac and Carmen Miranda hatful of fruit (pineapple, orange, lemon, blueberries, strawberries, etc).  Once the buzzard was carved up, it was braised and deboned after cooking.  A whole lot easier to pull all those icky tendons out of the legs after cooking, let me tell you. My post-Chef tasting plate.

 

And Chef 2 was in fine form in the demo.  Unlike on Tuesday where he seemed slightly bored, yesterday he was in full flight.  He showed us how to make churros (a slight variation on pâte à choux) and also the Austrian/German dumpling called knödel.  And for some reason he was on a roll making fun of one of the pastry chefs, even going so far as to shape one of the knödel like the Chef’s face, with emphasis on the nose.  It would have made no sense to anyone who isn’t at the school, but trust me, it was hilarious.

The practical hummed along fairly quickly.  My sharp boning knife got the Fucking Pheasant dispatched with reasonable speed, and the rest of it was just plain auto-pilot of organization, tasting, and even more tasting.  As usual, I’m not the fastest person in the room even when I’m working flat out, but the Chef said my dish was good, the taste was good, the seasoning was good and he was particularly happy with my knödel.  “You have very good knödel.”  Is it just me or does that sound dirty?

So we’re done with the little game birds for this term, and for that matter, for good (at least while at school).  I’m a whole lot less freaked out by the wee buzzards than I was only a few months ago, and even the Fucking Pheasant and its ten billion bones and tendons isn’t scary anymore.  While I’m generally feeling slightly out of sorts that school will be over in only a few weeks, a dish like the Fucking Pheasant made me realize how far I’ve come in just a short time.  But then again, the more you know, the more you realize you haven’t got a clue.

And guess what?  This morning was our “white box” workshop, the one I discussed last week.  And guess what else? The Chef for the workshop was Chef 3, who hasn’t seen us cook since mid-March.  Good thing I was wearing my lucky socks!